Brigham Young’s Promises to the Mormon Battalion: Every Single One Was Fulfilled (1846–1847)

In the summer of 1846, Brigham Young and members of the Quorum of the Twelve gave specific promises and blessings to the men of the Mormon Battalion as they departed Council Bluffs for the march to California. These were not vague spiritual encouragements. They were specific, concrete prophecies about the nature and outcome of the march.

The promises included:

1. The men would escape difficulties along the way.

2. They would never be required to engage in actual warfare against human enemies.

3. Their expedition would 'result in great good' and their 'names would be handed down in honorable remembrance to all generations.'

In his farewell address to the men, Brigham Young set the promise in covenant terms: 'You are now going into an enemy's land at your country's call. If you will live your religion, obey and respect your officers, and hold sacred the property of the people among whom you travel, and never take anything but what you pay for, I promise you in the name of Israel's God that not one of you shall fall by the hand of an enemy. Though there will be battles fought in your front and in your rear, on your right hand and on your left, you will not have any fighting to do except with wild beasts.'

Each of these promises was fulfilled. The Battalion marched nearly 2,000 miles through some of the harshest terrain in North America. They crossed New Mexico and Arizona deserts in midsummer heat. They scaled mountains with wagons. They survived on drastically reduced rations. They suffered from scurvy, exhaustion, and exposure. Three men died of illness or exhaustion on the march — but not one soldier was killed in battle with a human enemy. Their only significant 'combat' was with a herd of wild bulls in Arizona, from which three men were injured and three mules killed.

Battalion veteran James S. Brown, passing over a blood-stained battlefield in January 1847 where General Kearney's command had fought the Mexicans, recalled the promise and recorded his own witness: 'Here I pause and ask: Who on earth dare to make, of himself, such a promise, under the circumstances and in the name that this promise had been made? And yet over three hundred men who heard it could stand up after they had filled the time of their enlistment, and before high heaven and all the world could bear testimony to the literal fulfillment of those words spoken eight months before, in the camp in Missouri Valley, two thousand miles distant.'

The march did indeed result in 'great good.' The wages the men sent home funded the westward migration of the pioneer companies. Their road-building opened trade routes for the entire American Southwest. Their presence at Sutter's Mill contributed to the California Gold Rush discovery. The trails they and their fellow veterans blazed became the arteries of western expansion for a generation.

Church historian Brandon Metcalf, speaking on the 175th anniversary of the Battalion's march, confirmed: 'Ultimately, each of the promises given to the battalion by Brigham Young and members of the Twelve before they departed were fulfilled.' For Latter-day Saints, the fulfillment of every prophecy given to the Battalion is one of the clearest collective testimonies of inspired prophetic leadership in Church history.

A further promise was recorded from the same departure counsel. President Young told the volunteers that if they kept his instructions — to keep themselves and their camp neat and clean, to teach and live chastity, to refrain from swearing and from insulting one another, to avoid contentions with the Missourians, to carry their Bibles and Books of Mormon without imposing their beliefs on others, and to burn any playing cards in their possession — they would not be called upon to shed the blood of their fellow men, and they would be discharged within 800 miles of the proposed settlement of the Saints in the Great Basin, where the next temple would be built in a stronghold free from mobs. Both parts were fulfilled. The Battalion never fired a shot against a human enemy, and when the men were mustered out of service in California in 1847, they were discharged well within the promised distance of the Salt Lake Valley — later retellings place the discharge exactly 749 miles from the future temple site — allowing many of them to journey east in time to rejoin and help their arriving pioneer families.

The sacrifice itself was prophesied to be a blessing, and it was. When the call first came, many of the men were hesitant — the same nation now asking their help had repeatedly refused to protect the Saints from the mobs that drove them from Missouri and Illinois. But when Brigham Young asked the brethren to go, 541 men, 35 women, and 42 children enlisted out of pure obedience. William Hyde, leaving his wife and two small children, wrote: "When we were to meet with them again, God only knew. Nevertheless, we did not feel to murmur." Drusilla Hendricks, heartsick at her son's departure, went to milk the cow instead of seeing him off, and while she prayed for his safety she heard a voice answer: "It shall be done unto you as it was unto Abraham when he offered Isaac on the altar." "I don't know whether I milked or not," she wrote, "for I felt the Lord had spoken to me." The Battalion's donated clothing money helped fund the westward exodus of the Saints — without it, the Church could not have financially moved West.